These Discoveries about Happiness Might be Different Than You Think
Things I learned after a year of mind exploration
Who doesn’t want to be happy? Everybody wants to be happy and deserves to be happy. I was unhappy with my life, for quite a long time. Or maybe I think I was okay, I was fine, but the truth I was not. The past year had been quite adventurous for me. Please do not think that my adventure looks like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray and Love, or doing backpacking and traveling around the world. Nope, it was nothing like that. It involved a lot of reading, self-reflection, thinking, and working. Sounds boring, but it works.
The Nature of Happiness
What is exactly the main source of our happiness? Is it gift? Affection? Money? Gift would definitely make me happy. Affection would also make me happy. Good food also made me happy. But the happiness would not last long. How about achievements? I got accepted in favourite college in Indonesia and graduated with a good GPA but I didn’t feel really happy about it. I was not sad tough. I wasn’t sad or happy at the same time.
“Unhappiness is not the same as being sad.”
The cause of unhappiness comes from lack of fulfilment which attained through effortful achievement. I didn’t feel happy about my college degree and GPA not because I wasn’t grateful, but because I didn’t really fight for it. I suspect the feeling of gratitude will come after our fight toward our goal, no matter what the result is. Even if we lose the game, we will be grateful that we chose to made some effort. If you are feeling unhappy, maybe you should ask yourself a question, when did the last time you feel fulfilled?
Focus on Self Development
Most people would looking for achievements in a more direct way. I want better salary. I want to work at the bigger company on the country. I want to build a network to support my business. I want to be popular. I want my colleagues to respect me. The list goes on. Having this kind of list could be scary, the amount of effort we must do to achieve those lists is scary. Doing things in our scared mode is not the best option as we put unnecessary burden on our mind. Instead, we should focus on self development.
Focusing on self-development means we will focus in making positive changes within ourselves. The size of the change might not as important as you think. It doesn’t have to be something huge. Simply small but incremental change would do, like starting a reading or writing habit. These positive changes within ourselves will help us get better at things we do. We start to achieve things. Delivering task at work with better quality. Building new friendship. Trusted by other. Solving family issues. Obtaining emotional stability. These progress will be very good source of our confidence.
“The true confidence comes from sense of achievement which fuelled by real progress and hard work.”
Self development will work like positive feedback. Building confidence will be a catalyst for our learning process. The more confident we are, we start to handle more difficult tasks, involving in more social matters, and so on. The harder the obstacles, much more things we can learn, we become more skilful at things, which fuelled our confidence more.
Making your self development as a priority number one sounds selfish. But it’s completely okay. Being a better individual means you will be a better friend for your buddies, better child for your parent, better sibling for your brother and sister, and the list goes on. Eventually, the better version of us will bring benefit for our surroundings, which will also work like positive feedback.
Looking back and see how much progress we’ve made will bring joy to us.
Self Compassion
I was very hard on myself once, because I regarded my self as a failure as I looked at my peers and see how much they had progressed and I saw nothing from myself.
This going on for quite a while after I realised that my wrong doing in the past is not a hundred percent my fault. I was lazy, selfish, mean, and arrogant. Having those bad traits that hindered me from making progress is not completely my choice. My environment when I was still child shape my behaviour. The structure of my brain when I was born, the way my parent raised me, school environment, all things that happened in the past contribute to my mindset which affect my behaviour altogether.
This realisation really change how I think about myself. Forgiving myself become a lot easier with having this mindset. Here is a very good tip I get from School of Life :
“Treat yourself like you treat your best friend.”
What do you do when your best friend made some mistake? You forgive them. What do you do when your best friend is sad? You pat them in the back and bring them ice cream. We should do the same to ourselves.
Self compassion would allow us to take bigger risk in learning, because we know that we might make mistake and we are ready to forgive and encourage our future selves. Loving ourself might open a path to happiness.
Expectation Kills
Expectation is another form of assumption. Here’s an example from me:
I expect my first job seeking will be easy. I assumed that good GPA and college degree from top university will give me auto-hired ticket. I was wrong. I was rejected in my first interview. Let’s examine how this could happened. I assumed that good GPA, college degree, and my smartness was good enough to ace the interview. With these assumptions, I didn’t prepare well for the interview. I failed to answer the questions from the interviewer and I was pretty sure I looked nervous and unconfident at that time. My wrong expectation really killed my chance to land a job that day and successfully made me super sad and unhappy.
Now, it is quite obvious that there are no thing such as 100% success chance at the first try on everything. It’s just how the world works. It is reality. Our effort and practice is not to make us success, but its primary function is to increase our chance of success in the first place. We might reach 80% or 90% chance at some point in our life, but 100% is very rare. The world is full of probability. It is just the way it is.
The real question we should ask is why we held unrealistic expectation? Because there is a gap between our current knowledge and how the world really works.
Role of Deliberate Learning
Learning will be a very good way to reduce the gap. We can learn from book, online course, video, having meaningful conversation with smart people, etc. After a while, I realise that I never met someone who is wise, knowledgeable, and insightful that is not a reader. I suspect while collecting knowledge through conversation or meeting new people is great, it’s lacking of independent thinking, which will allow us to have our own idea and insight which comes from synthesis result of our knowledge and experience. Reading will force us to do this independent thinking because we will spend more time in thinking as we read our book.
Learning is great, but deliberate learning is better. Deliberate learning is learning with purpose. This learning should accompanied by constant thinking, questioning while maintaining humility. The purpose I suggest us to focus on is self-development.
Talking about humility, we should keep in mind that the chance for us to understand all existing knowledge is absolute 0. There are a lot of things we do not understand and other people might have better understanding than us. There are three sides of truth. Our version of truth, other person’s version of truth, and the absolute truth. Our version of truth might be the same as the absolute truth, but there is also chance where our version of truth is not the same as the absolute truth while the other person’s version of truth is closer to the absolute truth.
Speaking about knowledge, here is a very good mindset that I learned from Ray Dalio. The thing about knowledge is not about how would we do about things that we already know, but how would we do about things that we don’t know.
Deliberate learning will help us having a better understanding of the world, so we could set our expectation accordingly. Realising the flaw in our expectation by having humility will help us cope with the wrong expectation we might have.
Focus on Helping Other
“Sometimes, the best way to solve your own problems is to help someone else.”
I’ve always been a fan to Avatar series. But this quote from Iroh when Korra visited spirit world really struck my mind. This way of thinking change the way I see my working environment. Instead of solely working for my own payslip, I show up at work so my friends and co-workers could rely on me. I feel much better. I have a better mood when I arrived at works and I have so much fun while working.
Conclusion
Happiness is something you need to earn and worth the effort. Seeking knowledge with the purpose of self development will help you achieve true happiness. I believe main source of lack of happiness comes from lack of satisfaction, which come from lack of progress, lack of improvement. We neglect things that looks tiresome but actually will take us closer to happiness in the long term.
Manage your expectation by learning how the world really works, make sure you move forward by making positive progress, love yourself, and help other. If you feel unhappy, start asking questions and take action. Do not wait for the universe to save you from your unhappiness.
Happiness is unique. It will only come not to them who are pursuing it, but instead it will come as the side effect of our self-development.
Disclaimer :
I am neither a spiritual guru nor a human mind expert. My version of truth might be different than yours. I wish my discoveries will help you find another perspective about life and help you find your way to your version of happiness.
Special thanks for Prima Yogi Loviniltra, Khairani Ummah, Bram Dwi Kurniaji who are willing to be my first official editors for this article. You guys rocks!
